Campaign Descriptions

ECCO Campaigns

ECCO creates campaigns that allow oppressed people to use their innate power to change the political and economic systems that exploit them. Through our work on immigration, criminal justice reform, and economic justice, we work to dismantle the systems that ensure the incarceration and exploitation of Black, Brown, and poor people.

In addition to policy change, ECCO also works to build relationships and understanding across race, class, faith, and origin, and to understand all our issues and our futures as connected.

Immigrant Rights / Sin Fronteras

Problem: Immigrants in our country are under attack. With the repeal of DACA and an increase in ICE raids, hard working immigrant feelings are living in fear of deportation and separation.

Solution: ECCO is working to protect the human and civil rights of immigrants. We have four lines of defense:

Pass sanctuary policies such as the Safe Communities, Sheriff’s office non-compliance with ICE detainers at the county level; and pro-sanctuary city and school ordinances, and pro-immigrant police policies.

Organize Know Your Rights Trainings and Immigrant Support Clinics so immigrants can access immigration lawyers, social workers, health professionals, school representatives in preparation for ICE actions.

Create Rapid Response and Accompaniment teams, made up of congregations and organizations in regional clusters, that will provide support and advocacy for undocumented families who are going through an ICE detention or deportation process. These teams will engage in advocacy on specific deportation cases to heighten the contradiction between our values and the actions of ICE. We plan to wage public campaigns around specific deportations cases that highlight the moral catastrophe of a mass deportation policy. We are also raising funds to aid DACA students in applying renew their status.

Establish Sanctuary Congregations that will provide physical refuge for immigrants who are in danger of being deported. Two congregations exploring this option

Problem: For the last 40 years, we have been steadily and rapidly increasing the number and percentage of our people that we incarcerate, both in the United States as a whole and here in Massachusetts. According to a recent report published by MassINC:

MA’s incarceration rate has TRIPLED since the 1980’s.

MA has a recidivism rate of over 60%,

MA has amongst the highest racial disparities in the nation, with Black people eight times more likely to go to jail than white people, and Latinex people five times more likely.

Solution: ECCO is working on the state, county, and local level to end mass incarceration and create a racially just justice system.

On the state level, ECCO has helped put criminal justice reform at the forefront of MA’s legislative agenda. Now, we are helping lead a final statewide push to pass comprehensive reform, through legislative meetings, media work, and direct action.

On the county level, we are working to

Get Essex County Sheriff Coppinger to increase mental health services at the Middleton Jail.

Get District Attorney Blodgett to advance bail reform so that no one stays in jail because of inability to pay and to increase transparency and accountability around race.

On the local level in Lynn, we are working to strengthen our relationship with Lynn’s new police chief, and work to increase police accountability, training in implicit racial bias, and diversity within the police force. In 2016, we worked with the police to hold implicit bias training with the Lynn Police Department’s Command Staff.

Economic Justice

Problem:Though MA is one of the richest states in the country, many of our brothers and sisters are struggling. MA has the sixth highest level of income inequality, with child poverty rates continuing to rise. Our schools and roads are suffering

Solution: ECCO strives to create equality and opportunity for all MA residents, by passing fairer economic, labor, and tax policies.

Joining with Raise Up MA, ECCO is campaigning to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour and secure paid family leave for all workers, to ensure that people can take the time they need when they or a family member are sick or have a new baby. To do this, ECCO is working to collect 15,000 of the 260,000 signatures needed to get these measures on the 2018 ballot.

In 2018, we will also work to pass the Fair Share Amendment, which we have already advanced through the signature gathering and legislative approval processes. The Fair Share Amendment would collect $1.2 billion/year in revenue for education and transportation by increasing taxes for personal income over $1 million/year.

Overview of MCAN’s Successful Campaign to Pass the Highest State Minimum Wage and Strongest Earned Sick Time Laws in the Nation

November 2014

In 2013-14, MCAN (Massachusetts Communities Action Network) helped lead a statewide effort, together with allies in the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition, that succeeded in passing the highest state minimum wage in the country ($11.00/hour by 2017) and the nation’s strongest paid sick days policy (guaranteeing workers up to 40 hours a year of paid sick time). These reforms will benefit over one million people – one out of three workers in the state. The following is a short synopsis of the key phases of our campaign and our main accomplishments.

MCAN collected the most signatures of any organization in Massachusetts for the minimum wage – over 90,000 signatures, or over 25% of the total signatures during the campaign.

Creation of Raise Up Massachusetts

MCAN played a pivotal role in creating and leading the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition, which brought together faith, community and labor organizations that had been running separate, parallel efforts to raise the minimum wage and pass paid sick days into a single joint campaign. MCAN executive director, Lew Finfer, co-chaired the Raise Up coalition together with Harris Gruman, SEIU state director, and Deb Fastino, director of the Coalition for Social Justice. Nearly every grassroots organizing effort in Massachusetts participated in some way in the coalition. Raise Up employed a joint legislative and ballot strategy on both policies, in order to build maximum leverage with the legislature and have an option to go to the ballot if the legislature failed to act.

Legislative Campaign

As we built out the coalition in 2013, we started by waging a joint legislative effort on both minimum wage and earned sick time. To build support for legislation, MCAN met with legislators and held public meetings attended by members to build support for raising the minimum wage and passing earned sick time. In the spring of 2013, MCAN spearheaded a legislative hearing on the minimum wage attended by over 800 grassroots leaders.

Petition Signature Gathering Effort

While we pursued legislative avenues, we also proceeded with efforts to place both minimum wage and earned sick time measures on the ballot. This gave us critical leverage in our negotiations with the legislature. Between September-November 2013 and May-June 2014, approximately 100 MCAN congregations and community allies collected a total of 90,000 signatures to place two measures on the 2014 ballot: 1) to raise the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour including indexing and a raise in the tipped wage to 60 percent of the base wage, and 2) to enact earned sick time legislation granting workers the ability to earn up to 40 hours of paid sick time (unpaid leave if the employer had 10 or fewer employees). MCAN collected one-fourth of the total signatures collected by the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition. The overwhelming majority of MCAN’s 90,000 signatures were gathered by volunteers.

Passage of Minimum Wage Legislation

In November 2013, on the day that Raise Up submitted the first round of signatures to put both measures on the ballot, the Massachusetts Senate passed legislation raising the minimum wage to $11.00 per hour and indexing to inflation. To put pressure on the House to follow suit, MCAN collected signatures from over 300 clergy statewide calling on the House speaker to move similar legislation. Grasstops clergy presented this letter to the Speaker’s chief of staff in a meeting with him in the spring of 2014. We also got the Massachusetts Catholic Conference (i.e. the four Catholic bishops in the state) to endorse raising the minimum wage.

With the threat of a ballot campaign that would circumvent the legislature, the House speaker finally introduced and passed legislation raising the minimum wage to $10.50/hour but making a much smaller raise in the tipped wage and not indexing to inflation. MCAN continued to press for a legislation modeled on the Senate’s stronger bill. Throughout the conference committee process, MCAN leadership was in constant communication with staff in both the House and Senate leadership.

In June, both the House and Senate passed, and Gov. Deval Patrick signed, legislation that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $11.00 per hour by 2017, making Massachusetts the state with the highest minimum wage in the country. This is estimated to put close to $1 billion into the pockets of 600,000 low-wage workers. Of those who will benefit, 57 percent are women, and one out of three are workers of color.

Due to various considerations and technicalities, MCAN and the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition made a decision to accept this compromise legislation, which raised the base wage higher than our ballot measure ($11.00/hour as compared to $10.50/hour), but included a smaller increase in the tipped wage and no indexing to inflation. We were acutely aware of the racial and gender-specific impact of failing to make a meaningful increase in the tipped wage, and consulted closely with allies like ROC in making our decision. We are considering options to partner with allies like ROC to continue to work on these pieces of unfinished business.

Building our Voter Engagement Program

With the legislature failing to act on earned sick time, in June 2014 MCAN quickly pivoted into constructing its voter engagement effort to build support for the ballot measure (Question 4). This was MCAN’s first multi-region, coordinated voter engagement effort, and we intentionally designed our program to be de-centralized, volunteer-led, neighborhood-based, and values-based in its messaging.

The research on civic engagement is clear that direct contact at the door and over the phone increases the likelihood that people will vote, and that the most effective contact comes from well-trained people who are neighbors and friends. MCAN took this research to heart in deciding the two main voter engagement activities that we focused on:

Holding voter events inside members congregations, where clergy and other respected congregational leaders educated the people in their pews about Question 4, asked for their support and even enlisted volunteers.

Door-knocking in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding our member congregations, allowing our volunteers at the doors to cite a connection to a recognized institution in the voters’ neighborhood. The goal over the longer-term is for teams of congregational leaders to build an established relationship with voters in their area.

On a few occasions during our neighborhood canvassing, MCAN volunteers came across people at the doors who shared that they had already heard about Question 4 at their church, demonstrating the power of this sort of “layering” approach.

MCAN trained over 200 people and built 32 congregational or community-led voter teams. These teams designated their own “vote goal,” owned turf in the neighborhoods surrounding their congregation or institution, and made their own plan on how to reach their goals, combining door-knocking, phone-banking and voter outreach inside of their congregations.

Voter Engagement and GOTV

MCAN ran the largest non-partisan, volunteer 501c3 voter program in the state. Over a two-month period, MCAN volunteers made over 80,000 phone calls, knocked on over 30,000 doors and held over 50 events inside of member congregations to reach people with a message in support of Question 4 and motivating them to vote. MCAN tracked 14,000 face-to-face, on the phone or congregational conversations with voters. Much of this contact occurred during the days leading up to the election when it makes the most difference. We estimate that in the four-day period prior to Election Day, MCAN made 7231 dials, knocked on 10,945 doors, and had more than 3838 GOTV contacts with voters.

In addition to direct voter engagement strategies, MCAN also worked to get religious denominations and bodies to endorse Question 4 and educate their members on this. Our efforts led to endorsements by the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, who encouraged all parishes statewide to make announcements on Question 4 the Sunday before the election, as well as the Black Ministerial Alliance, COPANI (a network of Latino Evangelical churches across the state), the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Massachusetts, Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts.

Passage of Nation’s Strongest Sick Time Law

On November 4, MCAN and allies in Raise Up Massachusetts succeeded in passing the nation’s strongest sick time law, winning a strong majority of voters (59.4 percent support). When it takes effect on July 1, 2015, Question 4 will guarantee every worker in Massachusetts access to the benefit of earned sick time, and prohibit employer retaliation against workers who take time off due to illness. It will benefit an estimated one million workers, including 49 percent of Latino workers and 67 percent of workers who earn less than $25,000.